Servitude, a Bass Conditon

I know I’m never going to be a good guitarist. Still, I’m struggling to learn. I have manual dexterity of the sort that makes flipper babies feel superior. I’m slowly making progress though.

This makes my band-mates unhappy with me. You see I am their bassist. Guitar is something they wish I would not waste time with. My bass skills were once approaching competence. They have atrophied significantly.

Why don’t I stick to the one instrument that I can be most useful to my band on? There’s two reasons. The first is pragmatic. More important to me than my role as a bassist is my role as a songwriter. Hardly anyone writes songs on bass.

The other reason is I’m an only child who, in his younger days, was a social outcast. I’m not comfortable counting on people to be there for me. Learning bass is learning co-dependency. It’s an instrument that is absolutely useless outside of the context of a band. Nobody has ever said, “You know what this coffee shop needs? Somebody laying down a grove that makes the all the cups and saucers rattle.” No one has ever said, “I’m going to hit you with my latest folk song set to this funky ass bass line.”

If a band is like a marriage, a base player is like a battered spouse with no other career options. You’d like to think you can get out and build a life on your own but nobody will hire you solo and you have a tendency to fall in with other abusive spouses.

So the struggle to learn guitar goes on because I can’t count on anybody.